[stedolan]

The way to handle stack overflow gracefully on Linux is to check in your signal handler whether the faulting address was between the beginning of the stack and the current stack pointer. You can read the stack pointer register from the signal handler's third parameter.

This is also how the kernel grows the stack. When there's a fault, it compares the faulting address to the stack pointer register. This way, big frames don't confuse the automatic growing. (On Windows, by contrast, stack growth is detected using a single 4k guard page, so compilers must be careful with big frames and insert strided accesses)